Why do some organizations struggle with their social media strategy? Because they have the wrong attitude and demeanor going into it.

Two recent examples:

NY Times has their first social media editor. She started the other day and Twitted her first Tweet: how can @nytimes use twitter.

I wrote back, saying, change ‘use’ to ‘participate’ and you’re halfway there.

It’s a matter of perspective, demeanor and semantics. If Twitter is chattered conversation you need to treat it as such. If you approached a social gathering like a party and said, how am I going to use this situation, and worse, articulated it and acted like it, you’d come off as abrasive and crude.

This isn’t to say I think the Times is abrasive or crude. I think they’re doing very progressive things online and people like @palafo are fun to follow.

About 2 months ago I was filming a brand strategy and market research gathering. It was a closed, invite only affair of very smart, highly placed people at some of our well known advertising, marketing and branding organizations.

Despite this, their language still displayed blind spots in their thinking. They kept talking about and referring to Consumer Generated Content, how to harness CGC and how to interact and participate with CGC. The impulse, of course, is right. The semantics are wrong.

Again, language is important, it exposes prejudices and sensibilities. These are not ‘consumers’ we’re dealing with except in the crudest of distinctions. They are people and producers and creators and thinkers. As such they consume, but they are many things before they are Consumers.

At worst, the marketing/advertising community should drop the pretension and do like the rest of us and call it User Generated Content. At best, we need to come up with an entirely new name that encompasses the range and breadth and humanity that we see across this medium.

And then, maybe, these clumsy organizations will be ready to engage.

The video above is a preview from that event which — despite my nitpicking — was quite good. We’ll be releasing individual talks from it over the next few weeks.